Identifying and Advocating Best Practices in the Criminal Justice System. A Texas-Centric Examination of Current Conditions, Reform Initiatives, and Emerging Issues with a Special Emphasis on Capital Punishment.

State officials have rescheduled the execution of Georgia death row inmate Warren Lee Hill for Friday.

Hill was originally scheduled to be executed on Monday, but a Fulton
County judge issued a temporary stay so she could consider a legal
challenge filed by Hill’s attorneys. Hill is challenging a new state law
prohibiting the release of certain information related to Georgia’s
supply of lethal injection drugs.

A hearing on that issue has been scheduled for Thursday morning.

Separately, Hill’s attorneys have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court
to halt the execution, arguing Hill is mentally disabled and should not
be put to death.

This stay, rather, is about a recently enacted Georgia law that
classifies the identities of companies that manufacture, prescribe and
mix the execution drugs as a "confidential state secret." According to
proponents of the Lethal Injection Secrecy Law, pharmaceutical companies
making these drugs faced harassment and political pressure. As a
result, Hill's lawyers argue, the state is using "an unknown,
anonymously produced substance."

Georgia has already run into
problems. The DEA once confiscated the state's execution drug supply
after mixtures not approved by the FDA were used for two executions that
witnesses say involved "significant pain and suffering."

According
to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the state attorney general's
office released a document from an ostensibly independent lab that
claims Georgia's current lethal injection mix passes muster.

The name of the lab, along with other identifying information about the tests, was redacted.

This
issue ought to concern capital punishment's proponents at least as much
as, and perhaps even more than, it concerns those unalterably opposed
to the death penalty. If secrecy surrounding the integrity of Georgia's
execution process opens the door for more "cruel and unusual punishment"
defenses, the already slow course of capital cases could become
positively glacial.

And:

The larger issue here is not Warren Hill's rights, but ours. When the
state conducts legally sanctioned executions in the name of The People
we deserve the legal right, and bear the moral responsibility, to know
the who and the how as well as the why.

Huffington Post Live has an excellent segment, "The Sad State Of Habeas Corpus," hosted by Mike Sacks. It's available in archived streaming video at the link. It's a must-watch. It features one of our finest legal analysts, Andrew Cohen, and law professors Lee Kovarsky, Martha Rayner, and Steve Vladeck.

Hours before Warren Lee Hill, Jr., was scheduled to be put to death
on Monday, a Georgia state court judge temporarily halted his execution
in order to ensure that the drugs Georgia uses as part of its lethal
injection protocol—and the way the state obtained them—are legal. In the
process, Judge Gail Tusan didn’t just provide a reprieve to Hill, but
also to the U.S. Supreme Court, for which Hill’s death sentence poses a
constitutional question the significance of which goes far beyond his
case. And as with Hill’s reprieve, the Supreme Court’s absolution is
likely to be temporary, at best.

Hill is not an innocent man. His capital sentence arises from his
1990 killing of a fellow prisoner while serving a life sentence for the
murder of his girlfriend. In a country in which 32 states (and the
federal government) still allow capital punishment, Hill might seem an
unlikely candidate to become anything other than a statistic: But for
Monday’s stay, he would have been the 19th prisoner to be subjected to
capital punishment within the United States in 2013, and the 1,339th
since the Supreme Court ended its self-imposed moratorium on the death
penalty in 1976.

But if Hill’s execution is eventually carried out, it will set a very
dangerous precedent—even for those who are not generally opposed to
capital punishment. Hill is, by all accounts, mentally retarded (the
pejorative term still in vogue in legal analysis).

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The StandDown Texas Project

The StandDown Texas Project was organized in 2000 to advocate a moratorium on executions and a state-sponsored review of Texas' application of the death penalty.
To stand down is to go off duty temporarily, especially to review safety procedures.

Steve Hall

Project Director Steve Hall was chief of staff to the Attorney General of Texas from 1983-1991; he was an administrator of the Texas Resource Center from 1993-1995. He has worked for the U.S. Congress and several Texas legislators. Hall is a former journalist.